


Mismatched Gold

by altissimo



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: AU, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Graceling Realm, F/M, Happy Ending, Just a Thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-22
Updated: 2014-09-22
Packaged: 2018-02-16 23:00:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2287655
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/altissimo/pseuds/altissimo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Graceling Realm AU oneshot. Yeah, the pun is horrible. *Sips tea*</p>
<p>~</p>
<p>His eyes gleam at her, one black, one very dark blue. Lan Fan stares without meaning to, and his mouth tilts up at one corner, half a smile and half something not quite yet. "See something you like?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mismatched Gold

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I do not own any part of the Fullmetal Alchemist franchise. The manga, anime, characters, etc. all belong to Hiromu Arakawa. 
> 
> Sorry for typos. If you're familiar with Kristin Cashore's Graceling world, this'll be easy to understand. If not, everything is one Google search away. :)

Lan Fan is seventeen when she hears about Ling Yao.

Her grandfather is back from his work, and tells her about it over a dinner of soup and bread. Grandfather works by the sea, negotiating with traders, finding an agreeable bargain. His age caused people to underestimate him. Needless to say, they soon changed their views.

"The captain is Lienid. He's Graced, as are many other crew members. Very young for a captain, just a few years older than you. There aren't many people running it, but it's not a big ship either. A trading vessel, selling Lienid gold and other things. It's the gold that really stands out, though. It's the finest I've seen in Monport, and they drove a hard bargain. Ever since Queen Bitterblue ascended the throne, Lienid things have been in fashion with the well-to-do. It's a nice profit, what he's making, and the fact that he's Graced has been causing gossip in the workers."

Lan Fan listens, because she's always been fascinated with Lienid, the homeland of her late mother, and also because her grandfather is almost never this talkative. Grandfather tells her she's a lot more Lienid than Monsean. Fuu is her paternal grandfather, pure Monsean through and through, but he's seen too many trading ships and sailors from the island kingdom to not recognize the distinction.

"There's a Graced healer on board," Grandfather says. "A girl about your age, and a regular spitfire. One of the men tried to tease her a little bit, and he'll have a black eye for a while yet." Lan Fan likes this girl immediately. When she goes to the port, the sailors there always catcall at her, and if it wasn't for her grandfather's job, she'd have knives to each and every one of their throats by now.

* * *

She's a year older when it happens, a year harder, a year tougher, and the night is very dark.

Lan Fan sits on the bed in her room in Monport, and tries very hard not to cry. She hears Doctor Knox's words again - _There's basically no hope_ _. The illness isn't terminal, but it's damn hard to cure. He could live, but you'd have to be some kind of magician. I'm sorry, girl._

Her grandfather's voice.  _You'll need the money. It's not much, but it will last for a while yet. Don't waste it on me. There's no point at this stage._

A tear slips out anyway, and then another, and then another. Her heart beats fast and wild in her throat; Lan Fan's cheeks are wet. 

She slips between dreams and grey reality that tastes like brackish water in her mouth. Grandfather coughs in the next room, and Lan Fan forces herself out of bed. The door to his room is open, and a glass of water sits on the bedside table. She helps him drink it, and his hands tangle in the ends of her hair and smooth, something he hadn't done since she was very little.

Lan Fan puts the water back on the table; the tears gather, hot, between her eyelids when she blinks.

* * *

When she walks to the port to deliver her grandfather's letter of resignation to Captain Buccaneer tomorrow, a worker whistles at her. Lan Fan elbows him hard in the gut and doesn't look back.

* * *

The funeral passes quickly. It's a sailor's burial - Fuu was a seaman, once upon a time. Lan Fan doesn't cry, she just stands there on the dock of the silent ship, dry-eyed as the grey waves swallow her grandfather. There is a cold wind blowing off the ocean today, chopping the water and snapping strands of black hair loose from her bun. The landscape looks like a paint-by-number, grey and white and black, the horizon nearly indistinguishable between sea and sky. She focuses on it while Captain Buccaneer quietly steers the ship back towards land.

* * *

Six months later, she has a job at the port. It mainly involves walking back and forth along the dock delivering Buccaneer's messages. It's late afternoon now, her work done for the day, and she walks home, her pay for the week heavy in her pocket. There are all sorts of ships docked. Lan Fan walks quickly past them, looking ahead. If she walks as though she has something to do, somewhere to be, they won't bother her.

A voice calls amid the clamor of the docks, sounding from atop a ship.

"Hey there! The girl, in the black! Can you hear me?"

Lan Fan looks up in the general direction of the voice, fairly certain that she was the only girl in black clothing in the vicinity. She sees a sailor wave at her from the next ship over, and has the sudden, irritated urge to punch him in the face, as hard as she can.

She strides over and snaps at him. "What do you want?"

The distance is too great for her to see his face, though the sailor sounds young enough. Lan Fan's knife is out of her sleeve and in her left hand before she realises it. 

"You look like someone I know," the sailor calls down. 

Lan Fan frowns. "Why don't you come out where I can see your face first?"

He doesn't respond, instead stepping closer to her. The sun is to his back, and Lan Fan squints momentarily, stepping forward without meaning to. Sunlight glints on gold, in his ears and on one of his hands. Lienid then. She can see him fairly clearly now...

Lan Fan stops cold.

His eyes gleam at her, one black, one very dark blue. Lan Fan stares without meaning to, and his mouth tilts up at one corner, half a smile and half something not quite yet. "See something you like?"

Her face flushes, but she holds the sailor's gaze.  _Young._ _Lienid._ _Graced._ She wets her lips.

"What is your name, sailor?"

He jumps off the ship - Lan Fan is sure he's going to break his ankles - and lands as gracefully as a cat.

"My name's Ling Yao. And you're -" here he grins "-Lan Fan, am I right? You look like Fuu. He talks about you a lot, you know."

"I do not," Lan Fan says, ignoring the pang to her heart at the word _Fuu._  The words tumble out of her mouth, easy and unbidden. "I look more Lienid than Monsean."

"That's true," says Ling Yao. "But you also look like Fuu."

Lan Fan opens her mouth to say something, and is suddenly struck dumb by the fact that even though she has never seen this person before, they are conversing easily, with the familiarity of people who know each other by heart. Talking this way to someone is like remembering a lullaby with a familiar melody but not being able to recall the lyrics, and Lan Fan grapples for her place within the tune. _  
_

Ling carries on, seemingly not noticing her pause. "By the way, where is Fuu? I haven't seen him in a while."

She is caught off guard, and ducks her head behind her hair.  _The sun is very bright,_ she thinks.  _I should stop by the market, I need some more eggs. Maybe Rose will be the one selling today instead of Yoki. I should be able to get a good price._ Trying not to think of her grandfather, somewhere beneath the sea. _  
_

Ling clears his throat. "Lan Fan?"

She jolts back to attention, and forces herself to look him in the eyes. "My grandfather passed away six months ago from illness."

He stops still, and his voice is soft the next time he speaks, but not with pity. "I'm sorry."

Lan Fan nods, not trusting herself to speak, and turns away. She feels the weight of Ling Yao's mismatched gaze in her back as she leaves.

* * *

She's invited onto his ship the next time he docks at Monport. It isn't big, for a trading vessel, with a tiny crew. The Graced healer, Mei, is Ling's younger sister, and he wears a thin gold ring for her on his index finger, as Mei wears a ring a little bit thicker for him. Mei is the only family he has that's still alive, Ling tells her, and despite herself Lan Fan feels a communion with the siblings, a shared sense of isolation in being the only ones left.

Well, it soon turns out she'll have to share that communion with just about everyone else on the ship. Edward and Alphonse Elric, two Sunderan boys with gold hair and eyes, are orphans. Edward spends his days up in the rigging, hanging precariously and staring into a spyglass, while Alphonse is the ship's main and only cook. Alphonse is her age, and Edward is a year older. Ling, it turns out, is the oldest at twenty-one, three years Lan Fan's senior. Winry Rockbell is the Elrics' childhood friend, and as the mechanic, she is Graced with a supernatural skill in engineering. With one eye cornflower blue and the other light grey, Winry is quite possibly the friendliest - and most deadly - person Lan Fan has ever met.

There's another girl, Sheska. She seems very much unlike a sailor, but is Graced with incredible memory and works with the trade money and supplies. When they first met, Sheska was invisible behind a mountain of papers until she raised her stunning eyes, one brown and one hazel, behind thick glasses. 

"Is pretty much everyone on your ship Graced?" Lan Fan asks. Ling laughs. "The Graced in Lienid are free, as you know. I can't help it if I'm good at networking." Ling's Grace is perfect navigation, the ability to tell you, at any given moment, precisely where he is right now, and which direction is which.

She stays there for dinner at Winry's insistence. Al's cooking is delicious, and the talk and laughter in the air is infectious. Lan Fan puts down her fork for a toast of Monsean cider, and as she drinks, a thin little skin starts to stretch over the wound of Fuu's death.

Eleven days later, forty-eight hours before Ling leaves for Lienid, Lan Fan makes the decision to go with them.

* * *

They are just over halfway across the several-month long journey to Lienid when Ling offers her a permanent place on his ship. She knows Monsean trade, he says. She would be a fine negotiator.

Lan Fan is taken aback. Leave Monsea, for a life on the water?

But the more she considers it, the more it makes sense. She has no family in Monsea. Her job doesn't pay very much, and she's highly unlikely to keep it for an extended period of time. Granted, she could get married, which would provide her with security, but no one would want to marry a not-very-well-off, partially Lienid girl with no relatives and no dowry.

She looks into Ling's eyes, and he looks back. There is a quiet understanding in his eyes; they've reached a point where verbal communication is almost unnecessary.

"I hope you'll think on it, Lan Fan," he says, and gets up to check on Ed.

She does think, and a few days later, she approaches him. Ling is facing the ocean, leaning over the ship with a casual confidence. He doesn't turn around. 

"I'd be able to keep my home in Monsea." It isn't a question - Alphonse Elric told her that he, Ed, and Winry kept their childhood homes in Sunport.

"Yes," was the reply. "You'd also be given quarters in Lienid."

"I'll do it," she says.

He faces her now, and smiles, both corners of his mouth turned. She remembers the first time she saw him smile, but that was only half of it, the other half a promise, an anticipation. This is a real smile, and his Graceling eyes gleam again, only this time, Lan Fan is not ashamed to stare.

* * *

In Lienid, she meets Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye, the landlord and landlady of the crew's quarters. Roy is Lienid, while Riza, golden-haired and fiercely capable, was born in the Middluns. The whole thing is a large, three-story building in Ror City. Riza shows Lan Fan to her rooms - a kitchen, a bedroom, a washroom, and a drawing room. They are a comfortable size, and as Riza gives Lan Fan the key, she smiles.

"You belong here, even if you don't think so." Riza says. "The Lienid in you agrees, whether you know it or not."

Lan Fan stands in the drawing room with the key in her hands and wonders at the idea of belonging here, in this strange, colourful kingdom, and at the idea that Lienid has always been a part of her, had belonged to her, without her ever knowing it.

* * *

It's Winry, eventually, who convinces Lan Fan to have gold put in her ears. When it's over, Lan Fan looks at the hoops, how they flash in the light. Ling comes up behind her and takes her hand, by now a familiar, comforting gesture.  

"You look beautiful," he says, and even as she smiles, the tears gather, hot, between her eyelids when she blinks.

* * *

Two years later, in Monport, she invites the crew to her old home for dinner. They laugh and talk and eat, and when the plates are cleared away, Winry and Ed take a couch, while Alphonse and Mei take another. Lan Fan sits with Sheska, and plays with the gold in her ears. By the fireplace, Ling is looking at the small alcove where Lan Fan keeps a bowl of ocean water. A little bit of Fuu to honour. She gets up and walks to him, and he kisses her temple, winding his fingers through hers, the chill of his ring against her skin. There is no need for words.

They return to the ship quickly, save Lan Fan, in the event that someone might attempt to board it in the dead of night. When she returns to her old bedroom and slides her fingers across the bedspread, she feels like crying again. Surveying the room - her old desk, some books still piled on it from two years ago, the few clothes in her closet, now just a little bit too small. A glint of gold on the desk catches her eye, and she rises to inspect it.

It is a gold ring, a little bit thicker than the one Mei wears, lying in its open case on her desk. There's a little slip of paper, held down by the case, and when she takes it out, it reads, in Ling's handwriting:

_"See something you like?"_


End file.
